Testers only, please!

Ok, so, it’s yet another forum where testers can get together and share info, solve problems collectively. Why would I be excited? Well, that’s because this is the first time we have had something like this on our very own MSDN forums – it’s like a party for your buddies at your own house 🙂

I have been at Microsoft for four years now and I know for sure that we take testing really seriously here. We have some kick ass people thinking about process, tools and engineering practices specifically for testing. IMO, we have not been talking about our testing processes and tools externally as much as we could. Conversely, I am sure there are other testers with some pretty cool processes, tools and ideas that they would love to share with folks outside. This forum looks like the right place to share such stuff.

As a tester in Microsoft, I am glad that we have a forum now on MSDN, where we can talk to other testers in our ilk, not just about Microsoft products, but testing in general. I am pretty thrilled about the new forum and I hope this is a useful platform for testers to build a great community.

And yes – you can expect to see me shouting over the roof tops about my current favorite topic of manual testing and why I think it’s the black sheep of all testing topics 😉 See you there!

I manage 20 developers and 3 testers. A struggle I keep running into is ‘how technical should a tester be?’

We are using Team System. Our testers currently want to write manual tests only. They do a good job of this, but I feel like testers should be comfortable running load tests, recording web tests, setting up test data using DB Pro, etc.

Hi JFAttic – I would say that it depends on what is the day to day responsibilities of the tester. For instance, here at MSFT, a tester needs to be able to design and run automation, often as large and complex as the product itself; in addition to debugging product code and sometimes making bug fixes too. SO, effectively a tester becomes a test developer.

But I have seen many companies where there are purely manual testers that are either domain experts or just functional testers that work with a complementary automation tester whose only job would be to setup automation infrastructure and run automated tests. In your case, the ratio of dev to test is really high. So, I assume your devs do a high amount of unit testing on the product before handing it to the test team. In that case, IMO, the QA team should be aware of all the processes you mention already since they will be spending a lot of time doing those activities apart from the usual functional testing.